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Sapphire HD4870 Toxic Review

Conclusion:

What is there to say about the Sapphire HD4870 Toxic video card other than it is amazing? I was very surprised to see the benchmarking scores that it was able to produce. It was able to compete with and beat out the PowerColor HD4870 PCS+, which is also an overclocked HD4870 with a custom cooler. The Sapphire card was able to either compete with or beat just about every other card during both the stock and especially with the overclocked speeds, and in those it did not beat it kept the performance differential close. I was very pleased to see how well Sapphire paid attention to the little details of the card such as placing a large enough cooling solution on it to keep down the high temperatures the RV770 core has been producing, limiting the overclockability of the cards and the lifespan of them. I am a fan of the dual slot video card design, as it gives you more of a peace of mind that your card is not going to overheat and it will still be able to perform very well, however some people see it as a negative as it blocks some of the other slots that are located on your motherboard, which limits you when it comes to the upgradeability of your rig in the future.

The usage of VaporX technology also was a great addition to the cooling solution of the HD4870 Toxic, as it was able to keep the temperatures in check and allowed for quieter operation while it was idling as well as when it was under full load. I was very impressed that it was able to beat out another pre-overclocked video card of the same class. I do like that the card came overclocked right out of the box, as to someone who is not big into overclocking their video card or someone who has not done it before, will be able to see what kind of performance boost they will gain from it. The actual overclockability of the card was great as well, I was still able to add another 70MHz to the GPU and 200MHz to the memory, leaving me at 850MHz and 1200MHz, which is quite amazing! The only technical downside of the card that I have found is that it only has 512MB of GDDR5, if Sapphire had shoved in another 512MB and made it a total of 1GB, the performance of the card would be simply amazing. If you are looking to take the leap away from your older video card to something that is going to be able to give you the performance boost to your entire system, this card is what you should be looking for! I would suggest picking up at least one of these for your next build.